“Got that right, brother. Wade said. He surely did.”
Gray took another step toward Harrington. “When we get to Ellis, no one had paid for the freight. Railroaders took two of our horses and most of the corn we was going to plant. He was supposed to meet us when we got off the train. Supposed to take us on to here ’stead of just letting us stumble off on our own.”
“He’s coming,” said Harrington. He turned, dragged an old rag from his back pocket and wiped sweat off his brow despite the fact that it was a cool day. “First things first. Reckon most of you is hungry. Gonna see to that first.” He turned and quickly started giving directions to the women of Nicodemus. “All of you that’s got fires started, hurry up and get some food down these poor folks.” Then he walked away as though he couldn’t be bothered with such minor details as a missing town.
They were all too weary to do more than start unloading their freight. Then Harrington peered at a speck on the horizon.
“Wade’s coming yonder. Driving like Jeshu. He’s the only one hereabouts that has white horses. He’ll explain everything.”
The group quieted and waited in eerie silence. Wade drove up with a flourish, then jumped down and walked forward with his hand outstretched, his derby shoved back on his head. “Greetings friends, and welcome.”
“Where’s the buildings? Where are the churches? Where are the homes? The fine homes you promised? Don’t look like no promised land,” Gray said.
“They are all forthcoming, I can assure you. I have another town to worry about, too. About thirteen miles from here. All white same as this is all black. But you don’t see white folks complaining. This is a chance to show that you’re as good as white folks.”
“We know we is as good as white folks. Never been any question about that. We not as dumb as they is, though,” said Henry Partridge.
Wade flushed. “Now look here . . .”
“No, you look. You lied to us. Pure and simple. What we got here is more of white folks’ lies.”
“Don’t call me a liar, you black bast—” They all knew what he had been about to say. Wade started easing toward the buggy. Then he bolted and leaped into the seat. Reins in hand, he smartly slapped the leather across the horses’ backs.
There was no help for Wade out here. No white sheriff to back him up. No night riders for him to assemble. No jury-rigged courts to take away a black man’s land. With a cry, a few of the men began to run after the buggy. Taking the law into their own hands just as white men had been doing forever.
A man whose skin shimmered like coal ran toward Harrington’s horse. The startled horse reared, but Sidney Taylor had been a groomsman for many years and was one of the few elegant riders among the new arrivals. He vaulted into the saddle and raced after the terrified Wade.
Another man unhitched one of the mules that had been used to haul their wagons and joined the chase, although at a slower pace. Several ran after Wade on foot carrying pitchforks and shovels, and a few luckier men followed on worn-out mules and horses.
B. R. Wade had a fine start, but there was nowhere for him to go. Wade City, the little embryo of a town he had started, only had a couple of residents. Wouldn’t do him a bit of good to go there.
He headed toward the nearest dugout. The colonists were a good mile behind. He slammed through the door. Mrs. Lawlis was a huge woman who could not move quickly. Wade came hurtling into the room.
“You gotta hide me,” he blurted.
“Indians?”
“No, blacks. No time to explain.”
“Well, mister, there’s no place to hide you. None at all in this here house. Just look around.”
“Can’t let them catch me. They’re going to hang me.”
Mrs. Lawlis stepped to the doorway and shaded her eyes with her hand. A dusky horde was heading toward her dugout.
“Whoever they are, and whatever they plan to do, they’re going to be here pretty quick.” Nervously she looked at Wade, who was running around like a rat in a cage.
She waited, watching the group approach, then gasped as she felt Wade creep under her skirt. Her face burned with shame. The riders raced toward her soddy. Wade’s horses and buggy were loose in front. The team was tearing the heads off her precious marigolds.
Sidney Taylor jumped off his horse and headed for her doorway. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said.
She clutched the doorway for support. Taylor was blue-black and huge. She would put a bullet through her brain if she was about to suffer the fate worse than death. She cursed her husband, who had decided to go to Ellis, today of all days, leaving her here alone to face a mob of crazed Negroes.
“We’re looking for a thief by the name of Wade.”
“No Wade here. You can see that for yourself. No place to hide here.”
Bewildered, the man looked around the room, then turned and looked again at the fine team Wade had abandoned.
“Don’t see how he could have gone anywhere,” he said.
“Don’t see how he could have, either.”
“Looks like he just vanished into thin air.”
“Does for a fact.”
Sidney tipped his hat and walked over to his horse, mounted, and eyed the team and buggy. They would about cover the amount the railroad had taken for their freight bill. He looked at them for a long time.
“Don’t do it,” said Elijah Woodrow. “Ain’t gonna be worth it.” Elijah had been a field hand. He knew when to cut his losses and just keep hoeing.
“He stole from us first,” said Taylor.
“Did for a fact. But stealing’s stealing. Won’t no good come of it for nobody.”
“Maybe not. Not gonna steal them. Just going to hold them as collateral ’til that thieving Wade does right by us.”
Sidney climbed into the buggy and defiantly looked around at the group. “Someone can bring my horse on in,” he called. He slapped the reins across the team’s backs and headed toward Nicodemus.
“You can come out now,” Mrs. Lawlis said tersely when the last black man disappeared over the horizon.
“My apologies, ma’am,” said Wade. He looked out at the yard. “Did you see that? They stole my horses. People I gave every break in the world. Treated ’em just like I’d treat my own children.”
“Don’t know what the world is coming to when black people would think of hanging a white man,” mumbled Mrs. Lawlis. “They scared me plumb to death. When my man gets here he’ll hide you in back of the wagon and take you to Stockton.”
“ ’Preciate it,” said Wade. His lips were tight in his pale face. Embarrassed that he had hidden under her skirts, neither of them could stand to look each other in the eye.
“We may have to make a few concessions to the damn niggers now, but after we get their vote for the county seat, they can all go right square to hell.”
Henry Partridge stood before the wary group of immigrants and waved his claw hand in the air. “Quiet down, now. I called this here meeting ’cause we got to figure out what to do. And fast.”
Night was coming on, and they were looking for places to stretch out their pallets on the long-stemmed blue grass.
“We gotta eat,” Henry said. “Not just now and the day after. But from now on. This ain’t Heaven, and ain’t no manna gonna drop down.”
He turned to Harrington and Jones. “Did any of you sorry people know how you was gonna feed us after you got us here?” He trembled, scarcely able to contain his fury. “Did you? Since any fool can see we can’t chase down those rabbits, and the deer ain’t hardly gonna just stroll right up to us and let us hit them over the head with a stone.”
Harrington and Jones looked at each other helplessly.
“Wade promised to bring over wagonloads of supplies,” Jones said. “Food and tools.”
“Well, guess that ain’t gonna happen now, is it?”
Henry whirled around and yelled across the crowd. “Gotta eat. No one here is gonna feed us,” he said bitterly. “Might have kno
wn. Should have known. Dumb nigger that I am. But there’s little children to feed. Best we not waste time.”
Bethany closed her eyes and said a quick prayer of thanksgiving. A practical man. The Lord had sent them a practical man who knew how to move things along. He didn’t waste time brooding on the white man who had chopped off his fingers or the white man who had given him the lying picture promising a paradise in Kansas.
“There’s a creek over yonder,” Henry said. “Supposed to be a river. That’s what they called it in this here piece of paper.” He waved the circular in the air. “Says it’s the Solomon River. Yeah. That what it says. I say it’s a creek, and I say it’s the most pitiful dribble of water I’ve ever seen, but that is what we got. Got to make the most of it. Let’s see if there’s a fish in it.”
Hesitantly, Bethany approached Dolly’s dugout. Over one hundred people had turned around and gone back. Worse, they were the most prosperous ones who had the means to leave.
Bethany was determined that there would be no more broken promises in this community. The latest promise that she had some control over was that the menfolks had promised the first child born in Nicodemus would be born in a real home. They did not have much time. Carrie Williams was just a month away from giving birth.
“Hello,” she called softly. Dolly was sitting outside in the sunlight, stitching a patch on a piece of cloth. A sunbonnet protected her light, freckled skin. Her dress was a faded, soft, blue-calico print. It was worn and raggedy but, for all that, far better than the drab gray and brown linsey-woolsey dresses worn by nearly all the other women.
“Hello,” said Dolly, not bothering to warm her voice.
Bethany sighed, knowing she had antagonized this woman on the boat by her refusal to form a light-colored alliance. She hadn’t gone along with Dolly’s sense of superiority. Her temper flared suddenly at having to cater to this selfish woman. She got straight to the point.
“I’ve come to ask a favor of you. Would you consider turning your home over to Carrie Williams? We’re running out of time, and we had no idea there would be so many people coming in so soon.” Bethany fingered her skirt. “The thing is, we’ve promised Carrie a proper home for this new baby.”
Dolly’s eyes widened, and a sly smile crept across her face. She laid her sewing quietly in her lap as though she were the queen asked to give up her throne to a peasant.
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
Bethany whirled around.
Teddy Sommers had hunkered down and waited for the sky to fall after the men had come prancing back with Wade’s horses. What had these crazy niggers done? What were they thinking?
A week later, two men pulled up with a wagon load of supplies. “This here’s what you were promised from Wade.”
Clyde McCall spoke the words in a monotone, like they pained him. He stared into the distance as though the men gathered were beneath being honored with a look.
“This here is to see you through the winter,” he said slowly. He turned his head and shot a stream of tobacco. “If you all ain’t too shiftless to figure out how to make do.”
In the back of the wagon were sacks of flour, a few sacks of sugar, several barrels of lard, and bags of wheat and seed corn. No meat. Barely enough to feed twenty-five people for two months.
Henry Partridge stepped toward them, but Teddy reached out to stop him. “Let me,” he said.
He took off his hat before he spoke. “Don’t mean no disrespect, sirs, but can’t make it on that. You knows that. Black, white, or yellow. Not enough food. Not enough nothing. You folks have got to show a little mercy here. If we’d of knowed what we was getting into, we would have come with more.”
“White folks would have found out what they needed to know before they came.” With a superior smile on his face, Clyde winked at his companion. “Didn’t come here to chat. Came to give you people this generous offering from Mr. Wade and to take back what belongs to him.”
McCall jumped down from the wagon and unloaded the sparse cargo. He walked over to Wade’s horses, untied them, hitched them to his buggy, and set out across the prairie with his friend driving the other team and wagon.
Winter was coming. There were no houses, no lumber, and the meager supplies they had on hand would soon be depleted.
Teddy scouted the countryside and came back one day hauling a plow in the wagon he had borrowed from Harrington.
“Traded some fixing for a week’s use of this here contraption. They showed me how to use it. A week won’t be long enough to get very much done, but long enough to build a nice place for Carrie’s baby.”
They completed a half-sod house, half-dugout. Teddy studied the wistful faces of the womenfolks as they helped Carrie Williams tote her meager belongings inside. Shyly they offered little treasures—a cup here, a coveted piece of cloth there—as though they were contributing to a place of their own. Honoring their own first child.
Teddy called Henry Partridge aside. “Need to talk. Got to get this sod cutter back on time. But wasn’t nothing said about what we had to use it for.”
“Gonna be used for homes. That plain. We can’t put the women and chillum in snowbanks. Don’t cotton much to the idea for myself. What you got in mind?”
“No time to build places for everyone. I want to build a big place for us all. Use it for everything and everyone. Meetings, church, school, sick place. Belong to nobody and everybody.”
Henry scratched his head with his claw hand. “That a fine idea. Give folks a place to go they own themselves.”
They worked furiously cutting sod. The men worked all day and during the moonlight, and if the nights were cloudy, some of them carried lanterns and guided the way for the man plowing. A number of the women, hardened by field work, could match their physical strength. Their axes flew after they scoured the banks of the Solomon for dead cottonwood limbs. They framed in two windows and a door on the long side of the dugout.
“Poorest wood I’ve handled,” grumbled Teddy. “Might as well be using plant stalks.”
“You want oak, go back to Kentuck where they knowed what a tree was,” Henry said.
Before the week was out, they had built a thirty by fifty-foot sod building. Seeing the happiness on the faces of the women, Teddy turned to Henry.
“We done good. We done the right thing.”
“Too big to keep warm. No stove,” said Henry. “Man can still freeze to death there. Still got to hollow out fire ditches so folks can eat and stay warm.”
“Point is, Henry, women need something to give them hope so they stick around. That building’s going to make them stick. Now let’s figure out how to keep them alive.”
Then as the nights grew colder and the children shivered around the tiny clusters of campfires, the men frantically carved little caves into the sides of the creek banks with hoes and, in some cases, just their hands.
Bethany dug furiously. Dug like a field hand. Cold blazing anger was new to her. She had first felt it when she was dealing with Miss Nancy, and it boiled anew over Dolly’s refusal to help Carrie Williams. She worked until her hands bled, barked orders to the other women, then fought back frustrated tears.
Doctoring women couldn’t afford to make enemies.
Autumn fell heavily on the menfolks, for black women were watching women. Used to escaping into the fields or their trades, there was nowhere for the men to go. The women watched them all the time.
Like the coyotes they could hear off in the night, the women were a silent accusing presence. There were no woods to slip off to when their souls needed peace. There were just the watching eyes of the women in the dugouts.
In Kentucky, there had been a trembling worry that owls stole their souls some nights. Here in Kansas, the men would be glad to fly away into the peace of the night. Just for a while.
There were no trees on the prairie, so there were no owls to trade souls with. Nowhere to slip away to.
On the barren prairie, the womenf
olk could see them anywhere.
CHAPTER SIX
The campfire flickered with a puny smoky haze and was barely brighter than pine-tar torches shedding light on the face of the speaker. They had started off burning old cottonwood branches at the public meetings. Then the colonists realized wood was too valuable to light the face of someone who was probably just going to stir things up anyway.
But having been forbidden to meet in large groups since America was founded, there was a magical attraction to these gatherings. Despite the cold and the dark.
Bethany sighed and splayed her fingers across her face. She looked down at her feet. Paul Tripp irritated her more than anyone else. She hated his voice, his clothes, his arrogance, and most of all his ideas.
Tripp’s face gleamed in the light from the campfire. He had a thunderous voice and a way of making people believe.
“White men owe us,” he hollered. “Owe us back wages for all our years we were enslaved. Owe us for our blood.”
Bethany loathed the gatherings when they dwelt on the horrors of slavery. A man told of night riders chopping off his uncle’s hands just for wanting to come to Kansas. Another sobbed through his father’s hobbling—cutting the Achilles tendon so he couldn’t run away.
She didn’t doubt the validity. She knew of terrible things just from doctoring in the slave quarters. But all these memories did was stir up hatreds she knew they should set aside. The stories were a terrible legacy for the children, and she wanted them all to move on.
She listened with an aching heart. They spoke of cruelties that had come about in the new South that would never have been inflicted on blacks when they were someone’s property. Before the war they had been too valuable. What would have been the point in chopping off a slave’s hands and rendering him useless?
She watched Tripp sway the group. Now he wanted them to ask the state of Kansas for aid. “We got it coming,” Tripp said. “You know that. White folks have lived off our sweat long enough.”
Teddy came up beside her.
“Are you going to speak out against what he’s proposing?” she asked. “Someone has to.”
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